Jul 17 20:29:09 Hello!
Jul 17 20:29:16 Howdy!
Jul 17 20:29:20 It works!
Jul 17 20:29:27 Isn't technology amazing! haha
Jul 17 20:29:36 Yeah, when it works :-)
Jul 17 20:30:16 So have you recovered yet from your trip? I know how the time differences can get to you.
Jul 17 20:30:29 Yes. It took about 3 days to fully recover.
Jul 17 20:31:17 I appreciate you taking the time for this interview... I wish I had an organized list of questions for you
Jul 17 20:31:46 Instead I have a bunch of things on my mind, and I also wanted to make sure I got to ask some of the questions from the forums and the blog
Jul 17 20:31:56 No prolem. Reading the blog and the interview with Sean should be intersting.
Jul 17 20:32:24 I hope you can deal with my bad spelling :-)
Jul 17 20:32:25 So what did you think of Sean's answers to Engadgets questions today?
Jul 17 20:32:59 I think he was true to form. The 485% over unity claim is par.
Jul 17 20:33:17 It seems more like an eagle to me ;-)
Jul 17 20:33:42 485%, there isn't really a way to measure that incorrectly is there?
Jul 17 20:34:00 Nope. That's a pure fabrication.
Jul 17 20:34:33 It has been interesting watching the claims escalate, although since August they've always claimed overunity
Jul 17 20:34:57 Yes, and they have never shown *anything* of substance. Ever.
Jul 17 20:35:04 To us at least
Jul 17 20:35:18 :-) To anyone so far as anyone knows.
Jul 17 20:35:19 They "claim" to have other engineers reproduce it, correct?
Jul 17 20:35:50 I read on the forum that they revealed the name of the Engineer in the Kinetica interview to everyone on the SPDC. Are you a member of the SPDC?
Jul 17 20:35:54 There is only the Kinetica from November video. Other than that, I don't think so.
Jul 17 20:36:05 Nope!
Jul 17 20:36:26 I thought you might have access, as you have already signed an NDA
Jul 17 20:36:58 I signed the NDA so they could send me papers. They never did until I made suggestions that there was nothing for them to show.
Jul 17 20:37:25 And so they could tell me where and when the demo would be!
Jul 17 20:37:29 Its almost amazing to me that they even have papers. What level of quality would you say the papers are compared to others?
Jul 17 20:38:01 It's a typical engineering report level. I do that kind of stuff at work too, but I use more math!
Jul 17 20:38:39 How many papers have they shown you? The one we have mostly heard about indirectly is via your experiment.
Jul 17 20:39:11 Two, both covering the same topic. One is obviously written for investors, the other for engineers.
Jul 17 20:39:50 I was under the impression that the paper they shared with you demonstrated energy loss vs. energy gain, and that your experiment was to show those effects, am I wrong?
Jul 17 20:40:35 I think the purpose was to show how energy gain is possible. However, it only shows how loss is possible. The leap to energy gain is purely in their heads.
Jul 17 20:41:34 I've followed your experiment, but I don't have a physics background. Can you tell me the hypothesis, and what the results have shown?
Jul 17 20:42:29 The basis of Sv is that there is some kind of energy storage which takes place from the delay between magnetic aligment to misalignment.
Jul 17 20:42:42 The results were nothing to do with Sv!
Jul 17 20:43:01 I did show that magnets put a hell of a whomp onto the bearing though.
Jul 17 20:43:17 Which almost makes their excuse a reasonable one?
Jul 17 20:43:24 And I also showed it's not that hard to take real data with real equipment!
Jul 17 20:43:38 No, their excuse is pathetic.
Jul 17 20:44:13 One item that was confusing to me up until the Engadget interview was how much time the engineers had to build the demo
Jul 17 20:44:46 Sean said he gave them three days, but it sounded like the demo device was already built, but during transport they had to disassemble it and put it back together in London
Jul 17 20:44:57 Yes. You had one comment on your blog, and there was one on the Steorn forum about how incompetent they were.
Jul 17 20:45:10 Is that the story you heard while on site?
Jul 17 20:45:33 They had 4 months to build it!! To claim only 3 days is idiotic.
Jul 17 20:45:56 Well, it sounds like they built it and tested it in Dublin, took it apart, and when they attempted to reassemble it in London they had issues
Jul 17 20:46:00 No, my feeling about incompetence was my own, especially on the first day I went inside.
Jul 17 20:46:28 3 days assembling an already designed and tested demo unit doesn't seem too short of a time, they also claimed to have three of these units
Jul 17 20:46:28 That's the claim. I don't think so. Why have a lathe in the upstairs shop?
Jul 17 20:46:56 So you think they made it from scratch in London?
Jul 17 20:47:03 yes.
Jul 17 20:47:33 How many Steorn employees / contractors did you meet while in London?
Jul 17 20:47:49 I met two: Sean and Richard.
Jul 17 20:48:16 Don't know who were contractors.
Jul 17 20:48:30 Sean kept referring to the engineers working on the device
Jul 17 20:49:07 Yup. There is one other engineer "the frenchman" that Crank met. Marissa met him too.
Jul 17 20:49:10 He's said in the past that Steorn has contractors and employees working on the engineering
Jul 17 20:49:21 That's the claim!
Jul 17 20:50:01 Michael Daly is also mentioned as an engineer, he wasn't at the demo?
Jul 17 20:50:20 I'm pretty sure he is the one that supposedly discovered the effect, correct?
Jul 17 20:50:28 I don't know. If he was, he didn't show up while I was there.
Jul 17 20:50:36 I think so, according to lore.
Jul 17 20:51:09 Is Seamus an engineer also, have you spoken with him?
Jul 17 20:51:30 I have had e-mail from him. I don't know what his position is.
Jul 17 20:52:19 The main reason why I started SteornTracker, now Free Energy Tracker, is because I wanted to get to the bottom of what is going on.
Jul 17 20:52:34 I don't think there is a bottom :-)
Jul 17 20:52:54 I was hoping we'd see bottom this month, I would never have predicted how the demo turned out.
Jul 17 20:53:35 I think your hypothesis is the most reasonable one. It doesn't require any major conspiracies / etc
Jul 17 20:53:40 Yeah, total collapse. I was thinking that 100 years ago people would commit suicide over such an embarasement.
Jul 17 20:54:03 Conspiricy requires intellegence!
Jul 17 20:54:53 I never really understood the intensions of the demo. The supposed Jury process should cover the PR side of things, while they worked in secret on their tech
Jul 17 20:55:13 Do you think there is a Jury of 22?
Jul 17 20:55:33 Nothing makes sense. No matter how you look at it. Marissa says there is a jury, she didn't say how many.
Jul 17 20:56:26 I'm pretty confident in the discovery of Dr. Jeff Bechtold as a jury member. Steorn has hinted that there is other evidence waiting to be found on the internet that might reveal other jurors
Jul 17 20:56:51 Probably true. Just need to know where to look.
Jul 17 20:57:04 But why bother?
Jul 17 20:57:25 If you were on the Jury, how long would it take for you to be fed up enough to go public about the situation? Or would you just stay quiet like we've seen so far?
Jul 17 20:57:50 Good question. I'd probably have given up after 3 months.
Jul 17 20:57:55 Why bother looking? To reach the bottom.
Jul 17 20:58:12 There is no bottom. The jury has seen less than I have!!
Jul 17 20:58:31 I'm a bit amazed that a slick reporter in Ireland hasn't tried to crack the case. We haven't heard from an investor or a jury member since August
Jul 17 20:58:59 Investors may be embarrased. Jury members have better things to do.
Jul 17 20:59:50 But a good reporter could still clear the water for the rest of us. We in sort of this free energy purgatory
Jul 17 21:00:20 :-) There is no such thing as "free energy".
Jul 17 21:00:34 There could be interesting physics - but not here.
Jul 17 21:00:45 We wouldn't be here if energy wasn't mostly free
Jul 17 21:01:03 Gibbs "free energy" isn't the same thing!!!
Jul 17 21:01:38 economic freedom isn't the same as energy free :-)
Jul 17 21:02:24 Do you think if Steorn claimed to have tapped an "unknown energy source", or something like that, it would be easier on them with the scientific community?
Jul 17 21:02:38 Yes. Far easier.
Jul 17 21:03:24 Recently Sean has even hinted in moving in that direction, in some of his latest interviews
Jul 17 21:03:54 Interesting. He still needs to show *something* that works.
Jul 17 21:04:25 So what do you predict will happen to Steorn over the next few months? Sean has said another demo will take place, do you think he'll try again?
Jul 17 21:05:29 Yes, I think so. But he'll have it set up in secret and it won't work, so he won't actually tell anyone. In the mean time he'll be hoping the jury gets back to him, but he won't realize he hasn't shown them anything.
Jul 17 21:06:20 Do you think Steorn has additional documentation that shows how their technology works, which they may have shared with the Jury? Or do you think those two documents you've seen are it?
Jul 17 21:07:02 I think there's more. He shared most of his thinking on saturday for the SPDC when we were all upstairs.
Jul 17 21:07:23 Thinking on how the tech works?
Jul 17 21:07:51 More on how the physics works. There is a *lot* of hand waving!
Jul 17 21:08:08 I can definitely imagine the hands waving
Jul 17 21:08:22 :-) It was quite a show.
Jul 17 21:09:12 So how did you originally get introduced to Steorn?
Jul 17 21:09:49 My boss told me about it. So I signed up to be on the jury. I was accepted in the first round, but not for the jury.
Jul 17 21:10:24 Do you think Sean has been fairly consistent with his statements and interviews over the last 11 months?
Jul 17 21:10:36 Nope, it keeps changing.
Jul 17 21:11:26 what parts of his story do you think have changed the most?
Jul 17 21:12:06 The start-stop device - the jig to measure torque, they have all gone away.
Jul 17 21:12:59 Did Sean talk to you and the SPDC members at all about the transition from the start-stop device to the continuous device? He hinted in April that they were making "progress"
Jul 17 21:13:59 Nope. He mostly tried to "explain the effect". It was interesting because it was one way communication. Not many people asked questions, and Sean did most of the talking.
Jul 17 21:15:05 I find it interesting that he has revealed so much of the "discovery"
Jul 17 21:15:30 As we found after the demo, the NDA's that SPDC'ers have signed are pretty much worthless
Jul 17 21:15:44 Yeah, except it makes no sense! If it were real physics it would be reproducable.
Jul 17 21:16:34 Steorn has claimed that it has been reproduced by independent physicists, correct?
Jul 17 21:16:35 The NDA isn't worthless - it protects Steorn from breach of IP. It's just that the IP is worthless!
Jul 17 21:16:54 It think they have claimed that yes.
Jul 17 21:17:03 well, and NDA is worthless if the party who signed it ignores it
Jul 17 21:17:15 Like Grimer :-)
Jul 17 21:17:18 And that seems to be the case with a few SPDC members
Jul 17 21:17:21 exactly
Jul 17 21:17:38 There was also the Demo information leak
Jul 17 21:17:48 What leak?
Jul 17 21:18:14 Someone leaked the demo information onto FreeEnergyTracker and also on Dispatches
Jul 17 21:18:21 a few days before the demo
Jul 17 21:18:29 But was that Steorn doing it?
Jul 17 21:19:05 Do you think Steorn leaked it out to the blogs?
Jul 17 21:19:23 It's a PR campaign, the might have. But I don't know.
Jul 17 21:19:24 Here is the link to Dispatches: http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/2007/06/orbo_at_kinetica_museum_next_week.html
Jul 17 21:19:46 Yes, I remember reading it. It was correct, but I couldn't say so!
Jul 17 21:19:53 I think a less conspiratorial hypothesis would be that one of the 200+ SPDC members leaked it
Jul 17 21:20:05 That's simpler for sure.
Jul 17 21:21:30 What is your take on Steorn's level of funding? I think their funding is one reason why I keep on digging into this
Jul 17 21:22:10 They do seem to have deep pockets. But just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean they have to make sense.
Jul 17 21:22:11 Most scientists and business men, even those with visions of free energy, be it fusion, solar, etc, would love to get their hands on 14mil
Jul 17 21:22:28 Yeah, me included :-)
Jul 17 21:22:59 I have a difficult time believing that these investors didn't do some reasonable due diligence on their investment, but you never know
Jul 17 21:23:25 There's always people with more money than brains!
Jul 17 21:23:41 I guess so. I wish I knew more of these type of people ;-)
Jul 17 21:23:48 :-)
Jul 17 21:25:32 You spent some time in London with EarthTech. They seem like an interesting crowd. What were their impressions of Steorn?
Jul 17 21:26:15 MIxed. Has was trying to believe, Scott was trying to help, and Marissa was trying to leave :-)
Jul 17 21:26:42 That's Hal, not Has.
Jul 17 21:27:01 I thought it was interesting the cryptic postings Marissa left on the Forums, it seemed to give Steorn some credibility
Jul 17 21:27:39 Not if you met her. She was trying to be factual.
Jul 17 21:28:10 So there really is a jury, but so what?
Jul 17 21:28:18 They don't do anything, nor are they allowed to see anything.
Jul 17 21:28:33 What evidence do you have that suggests that?
Jul 17 21:28:52 Sean has stated that they can see everything, and that they have to if he wants the jury to work out
Jul 17 21:29:13 Sean said on friday during the public admission of failure of the demo that the jury had not seen a working device yet.
Jul 17 21:29:33 Was that on the google video? (have you watched the google video?)
Jul 17 21:29:52 Right - so you have inconsistent action with belief.
Jul 17 21:30:10 I have not watched it - I was there :-)
Jul 17 21:30:48 Well, if he gave them the papers necessary to replicate it, and if it were easily replicatable, then giving them a device wouldn't be necessary correct? I would think the more interesting question would be has any of the jury attempted to reproduce their results?
Jul 17 21:31:31 Scott from EarthTech who is not on the jury, said they got plans and could not reproduce any "over unity" effect.
Jul 17 21:31:45 So I expect no jury member has duplicated it either.
Jul 17 21:32:53 According to Sean, the Jury will report one way or the other at the end of this process. Do you think we'll ever see a report?
Jul 17 21:33:10 NO. There will never be an end.
Jul 17 21:33:46 Steorn will eventually either run out of funding or break their promise not to raise additional funds. At that point is it game over then?
Jul 17 21:34:05 From my perspective, the game is over now.
Jul 17 21:34:50 The game isn't over until the truth is revealed. Unfortunately we're all still in the dark about most things.
Jul 17 21:35:17 The truth has been revealed. There is nothing there. The emperor wears no clothes.
Jul 17 21:35:18 You're less in the dark then most of us, and your hypothesis seems to make more sense then the documentary ideas, etc
Jul 17 21:35:47 I think the observations made while upstairs tell me that it was a one man show.
Jul 17 21:36:11 A few engineers with a little skill could have done a much better fake!
Jul 17 21:36:23 So do you think the employees of Steorn are just milking it? Do you think Sean lied that they have 4 phd's under contract?
Jul 17 21:37:08 Yes, I think that's in his head. But he may have some people under contract, but he's not having them do any work.
Jul 17 21:37:47 So all the employees of Steorn, all the contractors, and the Jury, are simply letting Sean dream his dream and going with the flow?
Jul 17 21:38:06 sure. I did so I could visit London! :-)
Jul 17 21:38:50 I'm guessing you now would give Steorn less then my .001% chance of having anything, is that correct?
Jul 17 21:39:14 I started with 10^-25 and I'm at 10^-100 now :-)
Jul 17 21:39:18 :-)
Jul 17 21:40:52 I wish I was as convinced as you are. My .001% still keeps me glued to the situation.
Jul 17 21:41:07 It is entertaining!
Jul 17 21:41:26 It's almost as good as watching Lost
Jul 17 21:41:55 I should say I've learned a lot about magnetics and magnetic fluids from pinestone too. So it's been fun.
Jul 17 21:42:22 My wife loves lost :-)
Jul 17 21:42:55 So what do you think is in our energy future? I enjoyed watching Bussard's "Should Google Go Nuclear" and I've read a lot about where Solar Energy may take us in the next few years. Are there other technologies out there that we should keep an eye out for?
Jul 17 21:43:35 Earth thermal from ocean floor, and orbital solar collectors too.
Jul 17 21:44:00 I will be going into Bussard's and Farnsworth type fusors next.
Jul 17 21:44:45 The fusor idea seems fun, simply because a lot of the experiments can be done in a garage
Jul 17 21:44:55 Exactly :-)
Jul 17 21:45:33 Magnets are fun also. I picked up a few neos and I'm amazed by their strength
Jul 17 21:45:58 Yeah, I got some for the Sv experiment. My kids almost smashed their fingers with them.
Jul 17 21:46:04 Those really bring home how much stronger electromagnetism is vs. gravity!
Jul 17 21:46:37 Right. Some 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. And nuclear is bigger yet.
Jul 17 21:47:46 Actually magnetic force is 1/c as big as electric force, but they are related.
Jul 17 21:49:30 I hope I was able to get in most of the questions asked from readers on the blog, and I know you peek in every once in a while to answer questions, I really appreciate that. If folks have follow up questions to this interview, do you think we could all do a gabbly web chat session sometime in the near future?
Jul 17 21:50:32 Sure. Like I said, I don't think it will ever end. Truth never goes away.
Jul 17 21:51:33 I think it will eventually end, and I appreciate you making it a bit clearer for us. I hope it eventually ends, I never thought I'd get into this blogging hobby, and it takes up a fair amount of time! haha
Jul 17 21:52:12 Yeah, that's why I want to get back to quantum mechanics! There's only so much time in a day!
Jul 17 21:53:35 So true. Thanks again drmike, I really appreciate you taking the time
Jul 17 21:54:04 OK, see you on the blog. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike :-)